King of Las Vegas nearing completion

The first draft of my next book: The King of Las Vegas, is almost done. Hopefully I'll finish it up tonight or tomorrow, down to about the last 3K words. Then it's off to the first re-write. I'm not sure exactly how big this one will be, right now I'm thinking it'll be about 70K words, but I'll have to see what the re-write does to it.

My goal is to be able to send this out to my editor next week, I'll probably commission the cover this Friday. Once that all goes out, I'll start working on the next book in the Portals of Infinity series.

As for the King of Las Vegas, this story takes place in the same world as 'The Hammer Commission', it's not a sequel however, this story is about how Rafael, the Rakshasa that rules Las Vegas came to be. There were definitely some challenges in writing this, which may be why it's taken longer to write than expected. I do hope that everyone enjoys it, once it's finished.

-John

Car Work (fun!)

So, the Forester (2006 xt) is fixed and back on the road.
A new battery (I tried Bosch this time) was $140. I could have brought the duralast POS back to Autozone, as it was still under warranty, but there was no way I was going to give durlast another chance to do even more damage to my car.
The new battery cable was $70, and the new terminal was another $15. (the battery ATE the positive cable, it spewed out so much acid, never seen the like in all my life).
Replacing the cable was a pain, I had to pull the intercooler off the motor to get to the terminals, and routing the cables was a hassle.
Then I had to clean the acid off of the tray, the tray tie downs, everything around the battery in the engine compartment, take the battery hold down cross bar, clean the acid off of that, clean the rust off, prime it and repaint it.
The only sealed battery you can by in california is apparently Optima, and well, they're garbage (I bought one once, used the warranty 3 times in one week, then said screw it and went to something else).
I also noticed that none of the name brands I'm used to could be found in my area. I don't know if that's because of some stupid cali law, or some other reason. But hopefully the Bosch will work (Sears didn't have any diehards at the local Sears for my car when I checked on line, which was strange).
So, the duralast is offically the most expensive battery I've ever had for my car, as it cost me $100 in repairs, a weeks downtime, while I waited for parts, and a lot of freaking work out in the cold.
So yeah, don't buy Duralast, they're freaking acid generators. Never saw so much acid build up on a battery in my entire life.

Next is to replace the headlight housings and then the shocks/struts as well as change the oil in the rear end. Hopefully it will then last for another 10 years.

Book review and a recommendation

Pam Uphoff is one of the writers on a blog I read and often comment on, (Mad Genius Club), and a week or so ago she had put up an article on bit characters who got carried away and ended up with more of the story than they ever were intended to have, and could sometimes run off to do major things later on. This really isn't that uncommon an occurrence, my novella 'Dialene' is about a bit character from Children of Steel who didn't even have a line of dialogue in that book!

So yeah, these things happen.

But I found the bit she put up about one of her recent books 'Dancer' ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KI8KLOY - which is book number fifteen - Long Series!) to be very interesting, so as I'm a KU member, and the book is in KU, I figured I'd check it out, why not? Technically it's free.

And yes, I'm glad I read it. Don't let the cover fool you, it is definitely not just a book for women. It's very much a good action and adventure scifi story, and even though this is #15 in the series, this one definitely can stand alone. I found the first few pages a little confusing, because yes, this is a sequel in a series, but that didn't last long. Things were explained and done well enough that it didn't intrude into the story or into the flow of the story. Not once in the story have I run into anything that I couldn't understand because I hadn't read the prior books. If past knowledge was necessary, it was always there, as a comment or reminder, or worked in seamlessly in some manner.

I really enjoyed the story, and I would recommend that you at least check out the sample to see if you like it too. It's very much a futuristic world, where humanity has been subtly changed by a bunch of cross dimensional visitors who were stranded many hundreds of years ago, and whose genetic heritage has had some major effects (as well as their political ambitions). It's a very different world and society now, but not different enough that you can't understand it easily.

Some post convention stuff

Overall, the convention was good, even if I was only there for one day. I spent most of my time talking with old friends and acquaintances, and I even allowed myself to tell some old stories about things I had worked at or done many years ago. Normally I try to avoid those, because they're all past history, and I do enjoy hearing other people's stories.

The presentation went well, the crowd was smaller this year, but the con moved all of the panel rooms to the other hotel, which is on the other side of the convention center from the main convention events. Which is pretty stupid. So panel attendance was down overall from what I could see. I still made a few good connections however from the panel. I also found that my new set of slides caused me to run a bit longer than normal, so I may have to edit them down a little bit.

Need to put them up online today as well.

I think this sums up my mood for today:

Quick Question

For those of you who have been looking at the chapters I put up recently on my Patreon Account, do you think I should continue that story in 3rd person, or go back and do it in 1st?

For the rest of you who have read what I've published so far, the same question: Do you prefer my 1st person viewpoint style over the 3rd person, or does it make no difference to you?

Really been wondering about that a lot lately. I've been doing the current story in 3rd, because the story is in the Hammer Commission universe, and that story was written in third for a couple of particular reasons. But the POI series is all in 1st (as well as the COS stories) and I'm wondering if I should take the story I'm currently working on (King of Las Vegas) and flip it over to 1st person instead.

As I'm about a third into KOLV, I'd need to make that change soon, if I'm going to make it at all. But I'm curious as to which style my readers prefer.

Comments welcome!

I will be at Further Confusion Sat, the 16th

I'll be doing a panel on self-publishing on Sat the 16th at Further Confusion in San Jose at 11am, till I think 12:30 or so. I'll probably be at the con until 8 or 9. I'd like to be there longer, but don't have anyone to watch the dog.

If you want to stop by, feel free. I'll probably be hanging out around Rozga's table in the dealers den quite a bit.

Does anyone else find it funny

That people go on about how bad a series is, yet they continue to read it?
If it's so bad, why can't they put it down?
Why do they keep reading it?
It's not like someone has a gun to their head!

If I could, I'd like to ask you all for a favor.

Could you go to the product page, on Amazon, for Book one in the series, and 'vote up' some of the 4 and 5 star reviews? 

 

 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MKSLRH0

A while back, an organized group came through and voted up some of the 1 and 2 star reviews, so even though 80 percent of my reviews are 4 and 5 stars, the majority people see on the main page are 1 and 2.

So, if you could help me with this, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

-John

Should I add explicit sex scenes?

Really, should I? I'm already accused of writing porno's, etc, even though I haven't put any explicit sex in any of my books. So should I just say 'screw it' and put that stuff in?

I mean Laura K. Hamilton has made bank off of putting explicit sex in her stories, so have a lot of other authors. It's actually hard NOT to find explicit sex scenes in a lot of stories these days, so should I just give up and do it too? Like I said above, I'm already accused of it by my many detractors.

And if so, what level of explicitness would you like to see?

Please Stop Hitting my Forester

About five years ago, I bought a used 2006 Subaru Forester. The price was right, I needed a new car, and I wanted something versatile, because I have large dogs.

I think it's safe to say that it has been hit, more times, then all of the cars I have previously owned, combined. Thankfully none of the hits have been serious enough to require body work, but the car picks up one new dent or scratch, about every other month. It's been backed into at least once recently (the right fender is slightly bowed now) from the front, and twice from the rear (I had to replace one of the rear taillights, that was smashed, and the rear bumper and quarter panel don't quite match up anymore).

Then there are the shopping cart dents and scratches. The one from a home depot where someone let a bunch of something fall against my car and then fall over (dent above one of the doors, and a scratch in the window), hell I've even picked up two dents on the hood and a bunch on the roof of all places.

I don't know why people think it's okay to put dents in my car in parking lots, and then split. Yes, I know we have a lot of illegals here who can't drive (as well as a lot of semi-legals who also can't drive) who all have no ethics or morals at all, and who will run off whenever they damage someone's property. I know we also have a lot of regular citizens who do the same thing these days as well (but at least they tend to be better drivers, so getting hit by them isn't usual).

But please, really, stop hitting my car. I don't need anymore dents and scratches in it.

Free Stuff!

Well, I finished the short excerpt that covers what happens with Laria when she first visits earth in book 6 of Portals of Infinity. If you go to my author website (www.vanstry.net - link on the right sidebar) you'll see a tag on the left side of that page, for 'Free Stuff'. Click on that and you'll go to the new page I put up a few days ago, that contains mobi and epub versions of that short.

I figured as long as I was putting that up, I'd add a few other things! The 'Origin Story' for Will's sister Nikki is up there as well (25,000 words - it's a novella). I am giving that away for free, because a lot of the events in that story are covered, more or less, in book 3. This just gives it all from Nikki's perspective.

I also added to 'fanish' stories I wrote a while ago, about the 'Banner' character in Lisanne Norman's Sholan Alliance series. The first one is fairly short, (Recruitment) the second one is considerably longer, more of a novella than a short story.

If you haven't been to the website in a while, please check it out. As I mentioned a few months back, I added maps and sub-pages for each of the series that I write. Take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions.

Thanks,
-John
(PS, sorry about the way the mobi versions look, I need to find a different converter than Calibre for mobi files. I only just found out it has spacing issues.)

Server Died

My server (snowcloude.com, what the link on the right there points to) died about an hour ago.
Right now, it looks like a total loss, but we'll have to see.

I have a RAID5 in it, which we decided to go to a while ago, because they're more robust and we wanted to protect the data on the system. Well, checking it today, and one of the drives had died and  another one was throwing errors. So out to the store to buy two new drives.
We replaced the one that had died and let it rebuild, which it did just fine, and I guess it removed the bad sectors on the one throwing errors, because that one said it was now OK.

So, once that is all done we powered down the system, to put in a new backup drive (even with the raid we'd been doing backups, but the drive we had was no longer up to the task, so not everything was getting backed up). And apparently that killed the system. The raid is fried, apparently the raid card (very expensive raid card) decided to crap itself, and we've lost everything on the system. Some of it was backed up, but a lot of it was not.

I don't know when I'll get the system back up, we may be able to throw something temporary up for a while, but the server is 5 years old, so it may just be time to trash it and build a new one. I think if we do a raid again, we'll do a software raid, because then at least you're not spending a fortune on a fancy hardware raid controller, that only lasts a few years. Unlike the motherboard, which lasted a good long time.

EDIT: We were able to recover the system late last night. Still no idea why it crapped out on us. I immediately did a system wide backup to the new backup drive (now that we have one large enough). Not sure what the long term plan for that server is going to be right now though. Probably will have to start thinking about replacing it.